Impeached President Roh Moo-hyun began forming his legal defense team yesterday as South Korea braced for more massive anti-impeachment protests.
Rival North Korea -- in a veiled reference to the historic move to oust Roh -- meanwhile expressed concern over a "very unstable" political situation, and "unprecedented confusion" in the South.
Citing the state of affairs, Pyongyang requested that a round of inter-Korean economic talks, scheduled to begin today in the South, be switched to the Northern city of Kaesong, according to an official North Korean radio broadcast monitored by South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
Earlier in the day, Roh tapped a former adviser on civil affairs, Moon Jae-in, to put together a legal team to defend the president in the country's first ever impeachment, Roh spokesman Yoon Tae-young said. Moon is nicknamed "the king of senior presidential secretaries" for his weighty influence.
The Constitutional Court, which will rule on whether the impeachment of Roh was constitutional, plans to meet on Thursday to review the case.
Dubbed by some as a "coup without guns," the opposition-controlled parliament stunned the nation on Friday by impeaching Roh on charges of violating election rules and incompetence.
Opinion polls show that about seven in 10 South Koreans oppose the impeachment.
On Saturday night, about 50,000 angry demonstrators streamed into the streets of downtown Seoul, singing songs, waving candles and holding placards reading: "Defend Democracy!"
The movement against Roh's impeachment has found support not only among his political backers, but also from civic groups that have criticized alleged corruption in Roh's administration, his decision to send troops to Iraq and his recent tussle with authorities over illegal campaign funds ahead of next month's parliamentary elections.
In the run-up to the controversial impeachment, one Roh supporter set himself on fire and another tried to drive his car up the National Assembly steps and into the building.
But protests have been mostly peaceful.
Trying to quell concerns of a national division over the impeachment, the pro-government Uri Party vowed not to organize or lead any street protests that could fuel political unrest.
"This incident is clearly unconstitutional and illegal, but we will not stage any street demonstrations," Chung told business leaders yesterday.
Chung also urged the Constitutional Court for a swift ruling on the impeachment.
"It is completely up to the Constitutional Court whether this national emergency will last a week, a month or three months," he said.
The People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a civic group that sponsored Saturday's protest, called for nightly rallies in downtown Seoul to oppose what it calls the "oppression by the majority under the pretext of law."
The group is often critical of Roh, but says the opposition has gone too far.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS